Macbooks suck for 3d!

I tried my game Rubber Ninjas on a last generation macbook (not the very latest ones with nvidia gpu, the one before), 2 gb ram, intel x3100 card and... it sucks! it goes painfully slow, and doesnt even do multisampling!

Ok, i'm a bit polygon happy, but hell i dont think something like 30000 polygons is too much to ask these days! It runs great on my almost 2 year old imac even while supporting a 24" external monitor.

I think the iMac is a good machine, you pay a bit of premium, but it's a stylish box with a nice screen that runs os x and is fast enough in processing and graphics, but hey, there's no way I'll ever get a macbook if it sucks so much at 3d (and macbook pro is overpriced, basically you pay $700 more for the gfx card alone).

While it's true that they weren't graphical powerhouses, they weren't that bad. There was plenty of graphically impressive games that could run on them.

Your game doesn't look that graphically demanding. Only simple shading and lighting. Again, this isn't meant to be offensive, but an observation of other games that run great and look great on the same hardware.

You might want to look into what you can do to optimize the graphics as a lot of people have X3100 and GMA 950 hardware. MacBooks, Airs, and Mac minis. You would be crazy to cut out that much of your market.

Thanks for the benchmarks Seth, those look very promising. Check the Quake 4 performance, 5x higher framerate on the new macbooks! That's quite a jump.

Skorche Wrote:While it's true that they weren't graphical powerhouses, they weren't that bad. There was plenty of graphically impressive games that could run on them.

Like what?

Quote:You might want to look into what you can do to optimize the graphics as a lot of people have X3100 and GMA 950 hardware. MacBooks, Airs, and Mac minis. You would be crazy to cut out that much of your market.

Yeah that's the point. All those are 5 times slower at 3d than your average PC. I guess apple so far has basically chosen to give up non-casual 3d gaming for those systems. The nvidia benches were great news.

Najdorf Wrote:Yeah that's the point. All those are 5 times slower at 3d than your average PC. I guess apple so far has basically chosen to give up non-casual 3d gaming for those systems. The nvidia benches were great news.

On the contrary. Those are the average machines that your game will be running on. That is the only important fact.

I think you'd be crazy not to assume that people will try to run your game on a 4 year old computer. My main mac is 4 years old and has a radeon 9200... the intel graphics seem downright fast after that.

How do these new machines compare to an older MBP, with the ATI x1600? Obviously, the new MBP will trounce my october 2006 MBP. But I'm curious if the new MacBooks' integrated 9400 is better than my MBP's discrete x1600.